383 West Broadway Penthouse Sale Almost Breaks Real Estate Record

The Soho penthouse of artist Charles Ross closed for $25.58 million, falling just short of breaking the record for most expensive sale of a downtown co-op (the current record holder is 141 Prince Street’s penthouse, which sold for $27.5 million in April 2011). Located in a former cast-iron manufacturing building, the space originally went on the market in November 2013, listed for $32 million.

The 7,500-square-foot duplex unit includes four bedrooms and five full bathrooms. It also boasts a wine cellar that can hold 1,500 bottles, a media room, a massage room, original cast-iron columns, and a 4,200-square-foot roof terrace that has an outdoor kitchen and shower, a covered patio, and a manicured lawn.

Ross owned the penthouse at 383 West Broadway since the 1970s, the time when artists had just begun to move into the neighborhood’s vacant loft spaces due to their open, unobstructed layouts, large windows, and, most importantly, low rents and sale prices.

According to his website, Charles Ross, “creates large-scale prisms to project solar spectrum into architectural spaces; focuses sunlight into powerful beams to create solar burn works; draws the quantum behavior of light with dynamite; and works with a variety of other media including photography and video.” In 1967, he helped created one of the first artist co-ops at 80 Wooster Street, which some say launched the influx of artists to Soho.

For decades, Ross kept the unit as a raw studio space until he purchased the building’s roof deck and undertook a gut renovation of the loft in partnership with photographer Damion Berger. He added several skylights and direct access to the roof, which has glorious views of both the Empire State Building and the Freedom Tower. The buyer has not yet been identified, but he or she will definitely be getting a lot of calls from friends eager to get a view of the July 4th fireworks.